Readings week of December 15th.
- Linda Lueng
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses
*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*
Monday, December 15th
“Come, Lord, Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to the grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. This is exactly what it means to be “awake,” as the Gospel urges us! We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate. Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and Presence…
“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves. We are able to trust that he will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world… “Come, Lord Jesus” becomes then not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.
-- Excerpt from Preparing for Christmas, Richard Rohr
Chant: Inner Life of Being, bearing Christ within me, come – John Tavener, lyrics by Alan Krema and Darlene Franz
Tuesday, December 16th
"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light."
IN ONE RESPECT if in no other this metaphor of Isaiah's is a very relevant one for us and our age because we are also, God knows, a people who walk in darkness. There seems little need to explain. If darkness is meant to suggest a world where nobody can see very well—either themselves, or each other, or where they are heading, or even where they are standing at the moment; if darkness is meant to convey a sense of uncertainty, of being lost, of being afraid; if darkness suggests conflict, conflict between races, between nations, between individuals each pretty much out for himself when you come right down to it; then we live in a world that knows much about darkness. Darkness is what our newspapers are about. Darkness is what most of our best contemporary literature is about. Darkness fills the skies over our own cities no less than over the cities of our enemies. And in our single lives, we know much about darkness too. If we are people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
-- Originally published in The Hungering Dark by Frederic Buechner
-- By Kyrie Eleison
Wednesday, December 17th
“Ask that your consciousness be filled with Light; ask to be illumined to follow the path of simplicity with integrity and inner sight.
“Inspired by Divine Light and Love you begin to express Divine Will in action: thus will your journey be eased, joy will nest in your heart...
“A greater state of awareness being aroused, you recognize the interconnectedness of everything and everyone: the unity of diversity.”
— Nan Merrill, Lumen Christi: Holy Wisdom
Chant: With you is the well of life and in your light we see light – Susan Latimer
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